Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The TARDIS was screaming.

Red lights strobed over the console room as alarms blared in three different tones, none of which were reassuring. The whole room lurched sideways, sending the Doctor skidding around the console like he was auditioning for some sort of Time Lord ice skating competition.

“Yep! That’s them!” he shouted over the noise, stabbing a lever down. The screen flickered with an unmistakable silhouette. “Daleks. Again. Honestly, I should start charging them rent for all the time they spend in my life.”

The TARDIS let out a deep, disapproving rumble.

“No, don’t give me that tone, you know it’s true,” he shot back, flicking switches. “Long-range temporal tracking. Clever. Horrible, but clever. They can smell me from light-years away. Probably followed the last trail from the- nope, doesn’t matter. The point is, they’re on their way, and if they can’t get me, they’ll exterminate everything else. And I mean everything. Humans, cats, that little takeaway place I like in Shoreditch…” He grimaced. “Not letting them do that…”

Another violent shudder threw him sideways. He caught himself on the railing, glanced at a sputtering readout.

“Ah. Right. And that’d be the bit where you’re broken. Can’t make a proper interstellar jump without cooking the dimensional stabilisers. Which means… what? Hide on Mars? No. Wrong century. Hide under Mars? Even worse century. Black hole? Short-term solution, very short-term me. Cloak you? Worth a try, but they’re not scanning for you, are they? Nooo, they’re scanning for me. Brilliant.”

He stopped. Blinked. A slow grin spread across his face.

“The chameleon arch.”

He darted around the console, yanking open a panel, muttering as he dug through cables. “Ohhh, yes, that’s good. Hide in plain sight. Rewrite the biology, hide the memories, tuck everything away nice and neat in a fob watch. They’re looking for a full-grown Time Lord, not a human… Child!”

He froze mid-motion. “…A child.” His grin widened. “Ohhh, now that’s clever. No one looks for a child. Not even Daleks. Completely harmless, small, unremarkable… well, unremarkable for a few years at least.”

The TARDIS hummed – cautious, questioning.

“Yeah, I know. It’s drastic. But it’s neat. And it’ll work. They can’t track what isn’t there. All the dangerous bits – the Time Lord DNA, the memories, the voice that can talk half the galaxy into trouble – gone. Just a tiny human child. Safe as houses. Well… mostly safe as houses. Still Earth, after all.”

He reached up, pulling down the chameleon arch from the ceiling. A small fob watch clicked into place. He glanced at the console one last time.

“Somewhere safe,” he told her quietly. “Somewhere quiet. You choose. Somewhere no one will think twice about a baby turning up from nowhere.”

The TARDIS hummed again, softer this time – almost a promise.

“Right then.” He slipped the arch over his head. “Let’s do this before I change my mind.”

And then it hit – a tidal wave of pain ripping through every nerve, every cell, every atom. His knees buckled, vision stuttered between light and darkness. His hearts hammered and then began to slow, as if they, too, were being rewritten.

Through the roaring in his ears, he thought he heard the TARDIS’ hum – distant now, almost mournful.

His last coherent thought before the world went black was simple.

Don’t let them find me.

The village lay in a hush, the kind of summer night where the cold slips in after sunset and clings to the air. Lantern light spilled across cobblestones as Lily and James Potter walked side by side, hands tucked into their coat pockets.

They weren’t speaking much. The night seemed too still for casual chatter. When Lily finally did speak, her voice was quiet.

“We’ve been trying for so long.”

James exhaled, watching his breath curl into mist. “It’s not just us. The Potters… we’ve always had trouble. My mum- she wanted more than one, but…” He trailed off. “Could be me. Infertile. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

Lily reached over and gave his hand a squeeze, but before she could say anything, a strange sound cut through the still night.

Vworp… vworp… vworp…

Both of them froze. James’ head snapped towards the noise. “Did you hear that, Lils?” he whispered.

“I did.” She turned toward the sound, wand hand twitching. “That wasn’t anything I’ve ever heard before. What on Earth…”

They followed it around a bend in the lane – and there, standing impossibly out of place in the middle of the road, was a tall, blue police box. In front of it, on the ground, lay a small bundle of blankets.

Lily hurried forward, crouching down. Inside the bundle was a baby, fast asleep, tiny fists curled against his chest. His hair was brown, soft and fine, and when his eyelids fluttered open, deep brown eyes stared up at her — eyes that seemed far too knowing for a child so small. There was a small fob watch, hanging around the boy’s neck like a necklace, but neither of them took notice of it.

“James…” Lily’s voice was barely above a breath. “Where do you think he came from?”

“No one in their right mind would leave a baby outside in the cold like this,” James said, crouching beside her. “He’s probably an orphan.”

They were silent for a moment, the wind rustling through the hedgerows.

“But maybe…” James’ voice was quieter now, almost as if speaking to himself, “…it’s a sign.”

Lily looked at him. “A sign for what?”

“That we can take him in,” James said simply. “Raise him. Give him a home.”

Lily’s gaze returned to the baby. There was something about those brown eyes – something too old, too knowing – but the thought slipped away as quickly as it came. “I think… we definitely can’t leave him here. But people will ask questions. Where we got him from. Why we took him. Where his parents are.”

“They’d take him away,” James finished grimly.

He brushed a stray brown lock from the baby’s forehead, his fingers gentle. “Then… we’ll say he’s ours. We’ll say we wanted to keep it quiet. A surprise.”

Lily’s mouth twitched in reluctant amusement. “Might work. We’d have to put a glamour on him though. Green eyes to match mine, black hair to match yours?”

James’ grin spread. “No one would question it. Everyone already knows we’ve been trying for ages. And if it’s a surprise? Well, they’d just chalk it up to one of James Potter’s infamous pranks.”

Lily smiled, pulling her wand from her coat. A quick, silent spell washed over the child – brown hair darkening to inky black, eyes shifting into a vivid emerald green.

James’ grin softened into something warm as he looked down at the child. “See? Looks just like ours now.”

Lily held the baby up to inspect him, her smile growing. “We should call him Harry. After my grandfather, Henry ‘Harry’ Evans.”

“Then I want James for his middle name,” James said immediately with mock solemnity.

“Harry James Potter,” Lily said, laughing under her breath. “Welcome to our family.”

In the background, the blue box disappeared, satisfied that her friend would be safe for now.

…But of course, then came a prophecy and the Potter family was killed. Except for one. The young Harry James Potter survived.

And thus he was left out in the cold, yet again.

Chapter Text

Harry Potter was not a normal child.
Anyone who had ever met him could attest to that.

The neighbours noticed first. Mrs. Number Seven swore she’d once seen him in the front garden, having an animated conversation with a squirrel, complete with hand gestures, nodding, and what appeared to be a short round of applause at the end. Mr. Fletcher from Number Five said he’d caught the boy fiddling with the inside of his lawnmower, only for it to start running without petrol and cutting the grass into a perfect spiral. Harry once helped a classmate fix their broken wristwatch during recess, except no one could figure out why it now told the correct time in three different time zones.

And then there was the time he constructed what the school called a “slightly worrying contraption” out of paperclips, batteries, and an old toaster, which he insisted could “scan for microscopic threats.” He was given detention.

These oddities might have been cause for constant reprimand, but somewhere along the line, the Dursleys stopped bothering him. It wasn’t because they grew fond of him – quite the opposite. It was because they couldn’t keep up. Harry never argued, never cried, never reacted quite the way they wanted. And when Vernon tried to shout at him one morning, Harry had simply tilted his head, given him a long, thoughtful look, and asked, “Do you ever wonder how much of yourself is really you?” Vernon had left for work early that day and hadn’t tried again. From then on, they left him alone to do whatever peculiar things he wanted in the smallest bedroom.

Upstairs, Harry sat at a battered desk, the surface covered with pencil shavings, odd bits of string, and a half-disassembled alarm clock. In the centre of the mess lay a small notebook, its pages filled with sketches that only made sense to him: swirling symbols, strange machines, stars connected by crisscrossing lines. Today’s page was devoted to a tall blue box. He didn’t know why. He’d dreamt of it the night before – vivid dreams where he was running through corridors, fighting shadowy creatures with strange weapons, hearing the echo of a second heartbeat that wasn’t his.

He hummed to himself, a tune he couldn’t name but felt like it had been following him his whole life. The fob watch around his neck swung gently as he leaned over the desk. He’d had it as long as he could remember; heavy, warm, and oddly comforting. He never opened it – something told him it wasn’t time.

Pushing back his chair, he stood and caught sight of his reflection in the cracked mirror by the door. His hair was already untidy, but he reached up and deliberately mussed it further until it had the chaotic precision he preferred. Then his eyes drifted to the mark on his forehead. Everyone else called it a scar that looked like a lightning bolt, but to him it looked exactly like the ancient Sowilō rune. He wasn’t sure where he’d learned that word. He wasn’t even sure why it felt important.

He bounced down the stairs with all the energy of someone who had been up for hours, crossing the hall to the doormat where the morning post had arrived. A quick sift revealed the usual — a postcard from Vernon’s sister Marge on the Isle of Wight (“Bland beaches, even blander tourists,” Harry muttered, tossing it aside), a few brown envelopes that looked like bills (which he cheerfully pinned to the wall in the kitchen under the label URGENT: YOUR PROBLEM), and then… something unusual.

The last envelope was thick, made of heavy yellowish parchment. His brow furrowed. The address was handwritten in emerald green ink, every letter perfectly formed:

Mr H. Potter
The Smallest Bedroom
4 Privet Drive
Little Whinging
Surrey

He turned it over. The purple wax seal was stamped with an ornate coat of arms: a lion, an eagle, a badger, and a snake encircling a large letter H.

Harry’s fingers tightened around the parchment. His eyebrows lifted slowly, and without even realizing it, he started humming that strange tune again.

Harry slid a finger under the flap, carefully breaking the wax seal. The parchment gave a faint crack as he unfolded it, revealing the neatly inked words. He skimmed the first lines – Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry… – then stopped, frowned, and read them again, slower this time.

“…witchcraft?” he whispered, the word tasting strange and familiar all at once. His eyes darted down the page. Term begins 1 September… list of necessary books and equipment… owl delivery…

The first thing he did was sniff the parchment. It smelled faintly of smoke, as though it had sat beside a fire for years. Then he held it up to the light, turning it this way and that, half-expecting a hidden message to appear. “There could be invisible ink on it,” he muttered, “or lemon juice, or some kind of bioluminescent fungal residue- though the paper’s too dry for that- oh, stop overthinking.”

He leaned back in his chair, letter in hand, and considered the possibilities.
One: this was an elaborate prank.
Two: he’d finally tipped over the edge into complete, certifiable madness.
Three: magic was real.

Option one seemed unlikely – the handwriting was far too good, and the seal far too… confident. Option two was possible, but frankly, he felt far too sane to be insane. Which left option three.

Harry grinned slowly.

He got up, pacing the room. “If magic’s real,” he murmured, “then the rules aren’t what I thought they were. Which means all the rules might be wrong. Which means-” he stopped suddenly, eyes wide, “Oh, that’s interesting.”

Without further hesitation, he tucked the letter into his shirt pocket. The Dursleys were still asleep, the house silent except for the low hum of the refrigerator. Harry snatched a slice of bread, not bothering with butter, and began pacing again, thinking hard.

Magic. A school. An invitation addressed to him. It felt like a door had just opened – not metaphorically, but literally, like somewhere out there was a door with his name on it. But also definitely metaphorically.

He smiled to himself.
“Oh, I’m going,” he whispered. “Absolutely going.”